Whisper the Dead (The Lovegrove Legacy) (16 page)

The thunderstone pendant needed to be awakened. If she’d been a hedgewitch with no ingrained power of her own, she would have to steal that power from the earth, the rain, fire, trees, birds. A warlock would steal it from another witch, or kill for it, as Sophie had done.

Gretchen, being Gretchen, had frustration, disobedience, and impudence to spare, but she wasn’t certain it would do her much good in this case. She leaned over the talisman, drumming her fingers on her knees. “Well? Do something!”

She was going to have to remember that speaking idly was no longer a luxury for a witch without full control of her powers.

Preferably before she was struck deaf and her head exploded.

She clutched at her ears as dozens of voices whispered urgently, making gooseflesh rise on her arms. It was a jumble of noise, as disconcerting as hearing footsteps above you when you knew the attic was empty.

She read the spell again. She’d collected everything that was required, but her magic was telling her something was clearly
missing. She clenched her teeth. It was remarkably difficult to think with all the disembodied chatter.

The amulet was meant to protect her from harm. It was a shield or, better yet, a sword. The arrowhead needed to remember that it was an arrowhead, not just a trinket. It needed to remember how to be a weapon.

Before she could change her mind, Gretchen sliced through the skin of her thumb with the chiseled point. Pain flared. The cut opened.

“And that is the only pain of mine that you will ever have,” she said. “Or allow others to have.” She pushed all of the adrenaline and anxiety the whispering caused into the amulet.

“Only a warlock’s spell,”
the voices shouted in a chorus that made her head snap back. She was left with the rasping of her breath and blood trickling from her ears. And no particular clue as to what it meant.

But the magic in the amulet was sound.

When Emma climbed up into the waiting carriage, Cormac grinned at her from the rear-facing seat. Startled, she jerked back, her antlers scraping the side of the carriage. She glanced out of the door quickly as it shut, hoping the school footman hadn’t heard her squeak of surprise. She twitched the curtains shut. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Why?”

“I have a surprise,” he said, tugging her closer to him. When
the carriage turned off toward the Thames, Emma glanced at him questioningly. “I was supposed to visit Penelope.”

He was still grinning, a wicked gleam in his dark eyes. “I know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You look like the cat among the canaries,” she said. “What are you up to?”

“It’s high time you experienced some of the beauty of the witching world. You’ve experienced too much of its danger already. There is a debt owing to you, love.”

She liked the way he called her “love.” Liked it enough that she nearly missed the rest of his sentence. She forced herself to concentrate.

“I’m taking you to Vauxhall.”

“The pleasure gardens?” she asked, confused. She’d been once before to watch a balloon ascent. There’d been champagne and strawberries afterward, and a stroll through the picture gallery. “But that’s nothing to do with witches.”

“On a full moon, I think you’ll find you’re very much mistaken.”

There was a warm flutter in her belly at the promise in his voice. In the close confines of the carriage, his knee pressed against her. She cleared her throat. “What about Virgil?” she asked, hating to break the moment. “Won’t he see us together?”

Cormac smirked. “Virgil will follow this carriage to your aunt’s house, where Penelope has constructed herself a set of papier-mâché antlers and plans to parade in front of the window for the rest of the evening.”

That startled a laugh out of her. She could well imagine Penelope doing just that.

When they reached the Chadwick townhouse, a second carriage pulled down the lane behind them. The family crest had been taken off the door, but the dark wood and the brass fittings gleamed. This was no hired hack with the smell of gin and onions upon the cushions. The door opened and Cormac slipped out, keeping his body between the two carriages so as not to be seen from the road. Emma followed suit.

The carriage pulled away and the front door opened. Light spilled over the front step. Penelope waved from behind the butler, the shadow of her costume antlers crowning her head.

Cormac drew the curtains closed again as they pulled out into the street. “There he is,” he said softly. Emma followed his gaze and caught the briefest glimpse of Virgil leaning against the garden wall of the house across the street. He looked bored.

“He doesn’t have an umbrella,” Emma murmured. “That’s not very practical. Doesn’t he know how often it rains in London?” Thunder purred overhead, like a lazy jungle cat.

“As much as I’d like to see him as the drowned rat he is, best save your magic for the Fith-Fath glamour so no one at Vauxhall recognizes you.” He lifted a mask from the folds of the velvet cloak. “And you can wear this as well.”

It was made of supple leather, painted white and decorated with silver beads and spangles. The edges curled into spirals at the corner of each eye, with a fringe of glass beads falling from the bottom to further conceal her features. Cormac leaned
forward to hold it against her cheekbones while she tied the ribbon tightly.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” he said softly, so near that his lips nearly brushed hers. Her breath went warm in her chest.

“It’s nothing.” She didn’t want to tell him about the nightmares, not now. Not after he’d gone through so much trouble to give them an evening without warlocks and curses and secret witching societies. He didn’t need to know that she’d offered the Toad Mother a secret in exchange for a spell to allow her to open a portal. The spell required something personal that belonged to Ewan, which was up to Emma to supply, and a silver bough the Toad Mother promised to procure. According to the old stories, an apple branch wrapped in silver bells guaranteed the bearer safe passage to and from the Underworld. The apple tree had to grow on a hilltop, watered with rain gathered in thunderstorms and cut down under the light of an eclipsed blood moon. They were, understandably, not easy to come by.

“You’re miles away,” Cormac murmured.

She forced her attention back to the present. Cormac leaned back against the cushions with a kind of lazy confidence, like nothing could surprise him. The other boys tried to emulate him, but they always looked bored and peevish, whereas Cormac looked like he was harboring a delicious secret.

When they reached Vauxhall, he paid the entrance fee at the gate and stepped into the sprawling acreage of London’s most famous pleasure garden. Groves of trees were divided by gravel paths, waterfalls, grottos, and marble statues. An orchestra played
in the main rotunda where visitors danced or else retired to lavishly decorated supper boxes to eat delicate slices of ham and strawberries.

Cormac led her past the crowds, into the groves where nightingales sang and thousands of glass lamps were strung in the trees. They were set up to flicker into life all at once on musical cues. Emma would have suspected magic, if she didn’t know better.

They passed a tightrope dancer wearing spangles and crossing over a courtyard fountain on a rope bridge strung between a temple and a pavilion. Cormac held Emma’s hand, and she let herself be carried away with the bright, cheerful chaos of the garden. Fatigue fell off as they made their way deeper and deeper into the woods, where, judging by the furtive shadows, other couples were also seeking privacy.

“There are glamours and illusion charms to keep the others from stumbling upon us,” Cormac explained, stepping around a clump of stinking mayweed. “That evil plant keeps all but the most curious out anyway.”

Emma’s eyes watered. “I can see how.”

There was more foliage and fewer lamps, but other than the unfortunate smell, there was nothing else to differentiate this grove from any other grove in the park.

Until Cormac walked between two oak trees and vanished completely.

Emma’s mouth dropped open when the space between the trees rippled and gleamed like old-fashioned green glass. It mirrored nothing, did not show her stunned reflection, only the
sway of branches beyond, like any windowpane. There was a faint glitter though, like diamond dust clinging to the leaves and branches and the very air itself.

“Cormac?” she whispered. The witch knot on her palm began to feel warm.

Cormac did not reappear, but his arm extended to beckon her from behind the glittering wall of glass. Taking a deep breath, she took his hand and let herself be pulled forward. There was a brief moment of dizziness, a flash of light behind her eyelids, and then she was standing at his side while a swarm of miniature dragonfly maidens flew by.

It rivaled even the splendor of the goblin markets; as the secret garden under the full moon was clearly meant to be a place for celebration. There was no dread of the Order or the Rovers; it was simply witches in their best finery dancing under the stars without fear of discovery. Tables were piled with gingerbread, bottles of strawberry cordial, apple-petal cake, and crescent-shaped biscuits rolled in fine sugar that Cormac called moon cakes. Wind chimes shivered the air, not just with sound but with musical notes, like miniature harps being played up in the trees. Cormac brought her to a cobblestone maze surrounding a fountain where the stone mermaid had been animated to wash her hair with water being poured from a shell.

“It’s perfect here.” Emma smiled at him. “Like something out of a poem.”

“Nearly perfect,” he said. The tips of his ears were red when he pulled a silver chain from a pocket inside his cutaway coat. A
small star dangled and spun, the moonlight and lamplight glinting off tiny inset diamonds.

“It’s beautiful,” Emma breathed, touched.

“This way you always have your stars, even on a cloudy night,” he said gruffly.

He understood her. He saw her when so many others had only ever seen the quiet girl at the fringes of the ballroom. She beamed, fastening the clasp around her neck. And when she rose up on her tiptoes to kiss him, he closed his arms around her, lifting her up against his chest. She could have stayed there forever, his lips on hers and nothing else to think on.

When Godric came home a few hours later, Gretchen found him in the parlor, listlessly poking at the dwindling fire. “You have lovely rooms far from parental smothering,” she pointed out lightly. “And you’re wasting them. It’s shameful, really.”

“It’s merely trading one set of rules for another,” he returned. “Not to mention that it’s rather crowded with Keepers and their dead ancestors at the moment. Most of them are currently jammed into the parlor, trying to outmatch one another. It was giving me a headache.”

Gretchen straightened. “Is that so?”

He turned his head sharply, recognizing her tone. “Lord, no.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

He snorted. “I don’t need to be your twin to know there’s a very bad idea hatching inside that daft head of yours.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” she grumbled.

“Because we know you.”

She wouldn’t be gainsaid. Her eyes were shining. “I think it’s time you had a visit from your dear old cousin Geoffrey Cove, don’t you?” It had been too long since she’d donned a set of Godric’s old clothes and ran about town with him with all the freedom being dressed as a boy could offer.

“Most emphatically not.” He dropped his head in his hands, knowing the battle was already lost whatever he might have to say about it. Gretchen was bouncing on her toes, like a child about to enter a sweetshop. “Wouldn’t you rather sneak into a tavern, like we used to?”

She would actually, but this was more practical. “Not this time. I want to know what the Keepers are saying.”

“I could tell you.” He already knew it wouldn’t be good enough, before she shot him a telling look.

“You’re hardly ever there,” she added with a snort. “And I want to hear it for myself.”

“You want to rub their noses in it later, you mean.”

She grinned, unrepentant. “That too.”

She took the polished oak stairs two at a time, a habit her mother had been trying to break her of for years. She pulled off her gown impatiently, ripping the seams when she tugged too hard. She couldn’t ring for her lady’s maid to help her. Marie would never be able to keep such a secret from her mother’s gimlet glare. Gretchen pulled on trousers, a linen shirt, and a waistcoat to hide her curves, then buttoned a coat on top of it all. She already felt more like herself.

Godric was still in the parlor, guzzling port while he waited. She grabbed the bottle. “You can’t be three sheets to the wind if this is going to work.”

“Too late. Let’s stay home.”

She dragged him down the hall as he muttered about sisters and the ghost of the cat hiding behind the umbrella stand.

They hired a hack out on the street, which took them to his apartments. The building was reserved for the sons of the Order, but on the outside it looked like any other building on the block. This late at night, candles burned at the windows and lit torches flanked the path.

“Are you sure about this?” Godric asked. “It will only make you more cross.”

Gretchen knew that for him, it was just another building full of spirits and complications. He was perfectly happy being an earl’s son and lad-about-town. He didn’t particularly want to be a Keeper, while she might have seriously considered it, had it ever been a possibility. And that was the point. It was never going to be presented as a viable option.

“For God’s sake, Gretel, don’t swing your hips like that when you walk,” Godric hissed under his breath. “It’s a dead giveaway.”

He was a good brother. He might have preferred his ordinary life, but because she didn’t, he would stand at her side. He never tried to mold her to his own expectations, not like their parents. And if she wasn’t happy, he couldn’t be truly happy either. She felt the same way. She kissed his cheek. He frowned. “Have you been dipping into the port too?”